Bodies that count: Administering multispecies in Palestine/Israel’s borderlands

Abstract

Nonhuman bodies in many sizes and diverse social roles are central to Israel’s control mechanism in the Occupied West Bank. Delving into the agricultural record of the Israeli Civil Administration, I ask how the Israeli system of control operates through animal bodies. What does a bureaucratic record so invested in monitoring animals’ production, treatment, disease, and death tell about the potential disruption of power? Through a political ecology of human–animal entanglement, I argue that nonhuman bodies both reproduce human colonial relations and allow their constant interruption. Nonhumans challenge the power regime through their unpredictable mobility as well as in their role as both objects of a political economy and subjects of potential agricultural diseases, ecological risks, or public health threats. Breaking from contemporary multispecies scholarly literature’s focus on endangered species and relations of care, I place nonhuman bodies as actors of international-interspecies relations in colonial conditions and point to nonhumans, which are here to stay in the climate change era. By doing so, I reflect on the continuous significance of nonhuman bodies to the operation of power in the “borderlands” of Israel/Palestine and beyond.

Soil, territory, land: The spatial politics of settler organic farming in the West Bank, Israel/Palestine

“…In addition to the main crop cultivated by each one of these actors, the livestock in each modality can be seen as emblems of the different agricultural philosophies and eco-theological principles employed by them (cf. Gutkowski, 2020). In this regard, goats symbolize the connection to the soil and holding onto the land; free range chicken, whose cultivation requires an area seven times larger than a conventional chicken coop accommodate the logic of territorial expansion (Kotef, 2020); and earthworms, which operate as “soil engineers” in any given land, embody the placeless detachment from the specificities of local soil.…”

Speculation on infrastructural ecology: Pigeons, Gaza, and internet access

“…Across the region, in the Palestinian Territories, and in the Gaza Strip, there continues to be communities of pigeon rearers and fanciers, and a handful of hobbyists training messenger pigeons (Ashraf, 2018; Booth and Davidson, 2017; Saad, 2022). But the reliance on animals for everyday infrastructural purposes draws on millennia of ways of doing things, and, in the case of Gaza, contemporarily, Palestinians’ continued reliance on animals such as donkeys and horses is a response to Israeli-imposed closures and siege and the forced immobility these create (Gutkowski, 2020; Johnson, 2019).…”

Wild Legalities: Animals and Settler Colonialism in Palestine/Israel

“…Under this law, camel owners are required to microchip their camels for tracking and will bear criminal responsibility for accidents and damages caused by these animals. Finally, the new law requires owners to officially register the sale or transfer of ownership of their camels into a database managed by the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture (Jewish News Syndicate 2018; see also Gutkowski 2021). The years between 2014 and 2019 saw more than sixty enforcement operations, and yet only one‐third of the 3,000 to 4,500 camels living within the Green Line were registered by the end of this period (Zikri 2019).…”

“…“A camel in a den is not a camel,” he told me. Along these lines, Israeli Palestinian Knesset members protested that the new law criminalizes Bedouin shepherds instead of providing them with pastureland, as has been done with other grazing animals (Gutkowski 2021). The regulated and unregulated interactions between wild asses, camels, Bedouins, cars, and novel identification and tracking devices illuminate the important role of law in prescribing which animals may live in this place (by drinking spring water and roaming freely, for example) and who deserve to live less—or deserve less to live—through the strict regulation of their movement.…”

“…Often, no one claims the confiscated animals because the heavy costs of the government facility are imposed on the owner, who typically cannot afford them. Natalia Gutkowski (2021) argues, accordingly, that the quarantine is a technology of domination: “The quarantine became a channel to seize Palestinian‐owned animals in multiple circumstances: their location by roadsides, their entry to military fire zones, or the suspicion that they might be smuggled to Israel.” When I wondered why, instead of spending money and manpower to keep them alive, Israel does not euthanize the unclaimed animals, Daniel became visibly upset. “ Hell no!…”